Seifallah Ben Hassine

Seifallah Ben Hassine (8 November 1965-) was a leading Tunisian militant Islamist who was the co-founder of the Tunisian Combatant Group and the founder of Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia. He was a close ally of al-Qaeda, and he was believed to have been killed by a US airstrike in Libya in 2015 and a French military operation in Mali in 2019, although he was never confirmed to have been killed.

Biography
Seifallah Ben Hassine was born in Menzel Bourguiba, Tunisia on 8 November 1965, and he became active with the "Movement of Islamic Tendency" (the precursor of the Ennahda Movement) in 1980 before becoming a senior leader of the party's armed wing, the Tunisian Islamic Front. While he was in exile in Saudi Arabia due to a crackdown on Islamism, he had contact with members of the Armed Islamic Group and the LIFG, and he studied under the extremist cleric Abu Qatada in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. He fought alongside al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan before co-founding the Tunisian Combatant Group in 2000, and he ran a guesthouse for Tunisians in Jalalabad and provided the two Tunisian suicide bombers who killed Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud in September 2001. He was arrested in Turkey in February 2003 and extradited to Tunisia, where he was sentenced to 43 years in prison. In March 2011, he was amnestied following the Tunisian Revolution, and he founded Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia a month later. He personally led the storming of the US embassy in Tunis on 14 September 2012, and his supporters helped him evade the police as he preached at a mosque in central Tunis. After 2013, he ran his group's operations from Libya and ran training camps and a network of militant cells across the region. On 14 June 2015, he was believed to have been killed alongside Mokhtar Belmokhtar in a US airstrike on Ajdabiya, Libya, but his death was never confirmed; on 21 February 2019, France claimed to have killed him in an operation near El Akle on the border with Mauritania in northern Mali.